Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The Best Laid Plans...

It's a leap year. Some time ago (possibly last year when 12 Bottle first posted it) I made a mental note that I should have a Leap Year cocktail the next occurring leap year. I didn't think much more of it until this month. Like most of us I was caught up in Tiki Month and didn't think of the Leap Year until this week (more or less). So, I consulted Schumann'sAmerican Bar and OhGosh! and discovered that i did not have all the needed ingredients. Egads!

How could this have happened? It doesn't matter...

Anyway, to be thorough i checked another source and saw that this cocktail was listed as the variation and the original contained (of all things) Orange Gin! Something I've never had on hand. Okay...

So there i was without Grand Marnier, without regular gin (so sue me) but with a lemon. A lemon and triple sec and aged gin. I figured that the aged gin would nicely take the place of the woody component of the Grand Marnier and we'd have a nice approximation. An approximation but really another variation. Or maybe a (syrup-less) Fancy Aged Gin Sour. Hmmm, maybe not.

This got me thinking about cocktail variations and when something merely needs variation added to the end of it and when it needs a new name. Of course this brought to mind the DJ and his remixes. Remix standing in as a synonym for variation is good and all but the music metaphor only goes so far. I had planned to go on about this for a good portion of the post and recommend that everyone read This Is Your Brain On Music. Then go an a little more and kidnap Doug and have him point out that if your booze-blog contains this much prose before a drink recipe there`d better be a picture of "cheesecake" to hold the readers interest.

I think you just did that.

Right, Rule 6.

Rule 5!

So, why am I telling you about what I was going to do rather than just doing it? Because of this repost: